Wordsworth bubbled in my cellophanate bath water
yesterday, at the candled hour.

whilst horse tails whinnied from Joshua Bell—
Tchaikovsky in brood, 1878.

Oh, but if I had thought to Bogart the whole affair, well,
I'd be a modern Michelangelo, a downright da Vinci—

a Dostoyevsky before the dawn—

propped between the cold **** and the hot,
wet behind the ears.

Then I turn the note-the page-the scene:
Don't try this at home, they echo in the shackles of

celebrity. A drowning horse has sounded better
than their confession of our normality.

Photography* is poetry using light.
Poetry is painting with words.
Painting is sculpting on eyes.
Sculpting is music for stones.
Music is writing through feelings.
Writing is pottery with thoughts.
Pottery is photography of clay.

I constructed my sister’s portrait in three parts:
her eyes painted full color, bright with oil,
nose in colored pencil, a few shades more sallow,
and her mouth lightly smeared No. 2 pencil,

because I wasn’t sure how to form the words
for a police report never filed against you.
And sometimes I pass you on my way to town,
you still driving that ugly, blue pickup
with that same old sneer on your pig-like face--

I want to scream out my window the way I did
when I dreamed you came to me years in the future,
asking how I’ve been, some lame excuse to bury
your immorality with rice-paper niceties. I remember
my throat tore and bled as if I’d swallowed broken
metal wire as I repeated over and again:
Do you know what you did?
Do you know what you caused?

I constructed my sister’s portrait with three bits of paper
ripped apart and glued crudely together again.